Professionals or experts who have a vast amount of experience with a motor and/or cognitive task are often admired for their physical qualities, such as strength, speed, and coordination. They are also admired for qualities that are less evident, such as being in the right place at the right time and for the ability to strategically “out smart” a difficult situation. These more subtle qualities may be indicative of a proficiency in cognitive understanding. Research has found that professionals or experts who have a vast amount of experience in a variety of different tasks have efficient and effective cognitive processing, as compared to less skilled individuals.
An indication of cognition is evidenced by where one looks in order to detect and utilize the most important information in an environment. Eye movements reflect where a person is looking and searching in the environment, which may be referred to as “visual search.” Visual search patterns are typically not random but instead may be learned responses to environmental stimuli. Research has found that optimal visual search and selection patterns develop through experience and are different for experts and novices. One example includes soccer experts, who look at a kicker's hip (a pre-contact cue) to accurately determine and quickly react to the direction where the ball is going. Novices, comparatively, tend to focus on the ball, causing a longer time to make a decision and to initiate a movement.
Typically, experts show systematic visual search patterns from one viewing to the next and repeatedly look at the same locations to detect information. Still further, research has found that experts selectively and consistently attend to the most salient aspects when watching the task in which they are proficient. The visual search patterns of experts enable them to produce significantly higher numbers of correct responses regarding expected outcomes. As another example, expert tennis players are often able to determine the type of spin and direction of the ball from understanding visual components that are present within the environment even before the ball is contacted. Expert tennis players are able to do this better than those with less experience. Another example includes expert drivers who are able to search within their environment and “read” the road in order to avoid potential hazards. Expert drivers have more efficient cognitive and visual search strategies, enabling them to reduce the “cognitive load” and in turn “freeing up” valuable processing space should an unexpected event occur on the road, such as a child running across the road after a ball. Experts also report significantly higher levels of confidence in their responses than do novices.
Decision making capabilities can be affected by visual search patterns. One example includes law enforcement officers responding to a domestic violence situation. As the situation increases in tension, experienced police officers look at the hands of the violent person, whereas inexperienced officers look at the face of the violent person, and were late in seeing a gun being drawn, as well as significantly less likely to make the correct decision to shoot or not-shoot. The visual search patterns of experts also may enable them to initiate a movement faster than novices, such as pressing a brake in a car, running toward a location to intercept a ball, or firing a weapon.
The quality of motor responses also has been found to differ when less effective visual search patterns are used between people of similar skill level. For example, statistics have tested the quality (depth and accuracy) of service return between college level tennis players while measuring their visual search patterns on the tennis court. Results revealed that the players with less salient visual search behaviors were judged lowest in quality of service return. Hence, the cognitive understanding that experts have when watching a skill is evidenced via superior visual search strategies that provide them with an ability to anticipate more accurately than those with less experience and less effective visual search. This capacity also has been shown to relate to faster motor responses of a higher quality performance.
Effective visual search may be particularly important when watching an event unfold rather than reacting to the consequence of an event. For instance, looking for the baseball from a pitcher while standing in the batting position will provide little help in hitting the baseball, especially when the ball is traveling too fast for vision to track the ball. Instead, effective visual search involves looking at biomechanical cues within the motion of the pitch (e.g., arm rotation, grip, release point) in order to effectively read the type and velocity of the pitch.
Furthermore, the eye can track an object with precision and using focal vision only when there is slow relative movement between the observer and the object. The eyes can smoothly move together following the object until visual angular velocities reach 40 to 70 degrees per second. In observing human movement, this translates to surprisingly slow movements, like a person walking (3 mph) slowly past an observer six feet away. Therefore, when a task is occurring very fast, it may not matter if a person has perfect visual acuity and visual strength. What may matter is if they have effective visual search that enables them to pick up early occurrences within biomechanical phases (or pre-cues) that present themselves more slowly and help predict future outcomes, such as velocity, spin, and direction.
Thus, there is a need for systems and methods to evaluate human eye movement. In addition, there is a need for systems and methods to track and score individuals' eye movements, and recommend training tasks for individuals to improve their visual search and other eye movements.